"This is a massacre," the frantic Libyan woman, speaking by
telephone while cowering in her apartment in Tripoli, told CNN's
Anderson Cooper.

"I hope you know that people around the world are watching and
praying and wanting to do something," Anderson told her, as if
he were a stage prompter hinting at a performer's next line.
Whether or not she had been given a copy of the script, the
caller performed as expected: "[T]he first step [is to] make
Libya a no-fly zone. If you make Libya a no-fly zone, no more
mercenaries can come in.... There needs to be action. How much
more waiting, how much more watching, how much more people
dying?"

It's entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that the subject of
Cooper's interview was simply a terrified but resolute woman who
risked her life to describe the violence devouring her country
amid the death throes of Khadaffy's police state.

It's likewise possible that her call for international action to
impose a no-fly zone was a desperate plea from a victim, rather
than an act of media ventriloquism in which an anonymous figure
endorsed the first plank of a military campaign proposed by the
same neo-conservative kriegsbund that manipulated us into Iraq.

Surely it was a coincidence that the "Cry in the Night" from
Libya was echoed on the same network a few nights later by Iraq
war architect, former World Bank president, and accused war
criminal Paul Wolfowitz, who several days prior to Cooper's
dramatic broadcast called for a NATO-enforced "no fly zone" over
Libya.

In fact, the day following that interview, an ad hoc group
calling itself the Foreign Policy Initiative, which coalesced
from the remnants of the Project for a New American Century,
published an "open letter" to Mr. Obama demanding military
intervention – beginning with a no-fly zone – in Libya. The
neo-con framework for managing the Libyan crisis would create a
regional protectorate administered by NATO on behalf of the
"international community." This would nullify any effort on the
part of Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians, and others to achieve
true independence.

On previous experience with media campaigns on behalf of
humanitarian conquest, my incurable cynicism leads me to hear in
Cooper's "Cry in the Night" a faint but unmistakable echo of the
tearful, palpably earnest testimony of "Nayirah" – the wide-eyed
Kuwaiti girl who, using an assumed name to "protect her family,"
described what had befallen her country in the wake of the Iraqi
invasion.

Bravely composing herself as she recounted horrors no human eyes
should behold, the precociously self-possessed 15-year-old
volunteer nurse related to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus
how Iraqi soldiers stormed into the al-Addan Hospital, tore
newborn infants from incubators, and hurled them to the floor. A
short time later this testimony was "confirmed" by others who
offered similarly anguished testimony before the UN Security
Council.

During the three-month build-up to the January 1991 attack on
Baghdad, the image of Kuwaiti "incubator babies" was endlessly
recycled as a talking point in media interviews, presidential
speeches, and debates in Congress and the UN. A post-war opinion
survey found that the story of the "incubator babies" was the
single most potent weapon deployed by the Bush administration in
its campaign to build public support for the attack on Iraq.

This atrocity account was particularly effective in overcoming
the skepticism of people espousing a progressive point of view.

"I completely understood his feelings," Regan pointed out. After
all, "who could countenance such brutality? The news of the
slaughter had come at a key moment in the deliberations about
whether the U.S. would invade Iraq. Those who watched the
non-stop debates on TV saw that many of those who had previously
wavered on the issue had been turned into warriors by this
shocking incident. Too bad it never happened."

"Nayirah" was not a traumatized ingénue who had witnessed an act
of barbarism worthy of the Einsatzgruppen; she was actually the
daughter of Saud Nasi al-Sabah, Kuwait's ambassador to the
United States (and a member of the emirate's royal family). Her
script had been written by the Washington-based PR firm Hill &
Knowlton, which – under the supervision of former Bush
administration Chief of Staff Craig Fuller – had put together a
campaign to build public support for the impending war.

It wasn't difficult to convince the public that Saddam was a
hideous thug. Selling the idea of a major war in the Middle East
was a more daunting proposition. In late 1990, Hal Steward, a
retired Army propaganda officer, defined the problem for the
administration: "If and when the shooting starts, reporters will
begin to wonder why American soldiers are dying for oil-rich
sheiks. The U.S. military had better get cracking to come up
with a public relations plan that will supply the answers the
public can accept."

The image of newborn Kuwaiti infants being ripped from
incubators was an updated riff on a classic war propaganda theme
performed by British intelligence – and its American fellow
travelers – in their efforts to provoke U.S. intervention in
World War I.

The WWI-era equivalent of the Kuwaiti "incubator babies" were
the Belgian infants who were supposedly spitted on bayonets by
hairy-knuckled Huns in Pickelhaube helmets. German soldiers did
this to amuse themselves once they could no longer sate their
prurient interests by raping Belgian women and then amputating
their breasts. So the American public was told, in all
seriousness, by people working on behalf of a secretive British
propaganda committee headed by Charles Masterman.

In 1915, an official Commission headed by Viscount James Bryce,
a notable British historian, "verified" those atrocity stories
without naming a specific witness or victim. This didn't satisfy
Clarence Darrow, who offered a reward of $1,000 to anyone who
could produce a Belgian or French victim who had been mutilated
by German troops. That bounty went unclaimed.

"After the war," recounts Thomas Fleming in his book Illusion of
Victory, "historians who sought to examine the documentation for
Bryce's stories were told that the files had mysteriously
disappeared. This blatant evasion prompted most historians to
dismiss 99 percent of Bryce's atrocities as fabrications."

War emancipates every base and repulsive impulse to which fallen
man is susceptible. So it's certain that some German troops
(like their French, Belgian, British, and American counterparts)
exploited opportunities to commit individual acts of depraved
cruelty. But the purpose of the war propaganda peddled by the
Anglo-American elite, as Fleming observes, was to create a
widespread public image of Germans as "monsters capable of
appalling sadism" – thereby coating an appeal to murderous
collective hatred with a lacquer of sanctimony.

I've described agitprop of this variety as "atrocity porn." It
is designed to appeal to prurient interests and manipulate a
dangerous appetite – in this case, what Augustine calls the
libido domimandi, or the lust to rule over others.

The trick is to leave the target audience at once shivering in
horror at a spectacle of sub-human depravity, panting with a
visceral desire for vengeance, and rapturously self-righteous
about the purity of its humane motives. People who succumb to it
are easily subsumed into a hive mind of officially sanctioned
hatred, and prepared to perpetrate crimes even more hideous than
those that they believe typify the enemy.

Rhetoric of that kind abounded during the French Revolution,
particularly the Jacobin regime's war to annihilate the
rebellious Vendee. It also figured prominently in the Lincoln
regime's war to conquer the newly independent southern states.
However, it's difficult to find a better expression of that
mindset than the one offered in an editorial published in 1920
by Krasni Mech (The Red Sword), a publication of the Soviet
Cheka secret police:

"Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute,
because it rests on a new ideal. Our aim is to destroy all forms
of oppression and violence. To us, everything is permitted, for
we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and
reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its
shackles ... Blood? Let blood flow like water ... for only
through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves
forever." (Emphasis added.)

In pursuing his Grand Crusade for Democracy, Woodrow Wilson was
squarely in that tradition, extolling the supposed virtue of
"Force without stint or limit ... the righteous and triumphant
Force which shall make Right the law of the world and cast every
selfish dominion in the dust." To fortify the American "war
will" through a steady diet of atrocity porn, the Wilson
administration created a Department of Public Information that
liaised with its British equivalent, as well as quasi-private
British propaganda fronts such as the Navy League. That
organization, Fleming points out, included "dozens of major
bankers and corporate executives, from J.P. Morgan Jr. to
Cornelius Vanderbilt."

Through absolutely no fault of his own, Anderson Cooper is a
great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Of considerably
greater interest is the fact that as a student at Yale, Cooper
spent two summers as an intern at Langley in a CIA program
designed to cultivate future intelligence operatives.

When asked about Cooper's background with the CIA, a CNN
spokeswoman insisted that he chose not to pursue a job with the
Agency after graduating from Yale. The same can be said,
however, of many of the CIA's most valuable media assets.

As Carl Bernstein documented decades ago, the CIA "ran a formal
training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be
journalists. Intelligence officers were 'taught how to make
noises like reporters,' explained a high CIA official, and were
then placed in major news organizations with help from
management. 'These were the guys who went through the ranks and
were told, 'You're going to be a journalist,' the CIA official
said. Relatively few of the 400-some [media] relationships
described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most
involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when
they began undertaking tasks for the Agency."

By way of an initiative called "Operation Mockingbird," the CIA
built a large seraglio of paid media courtesans. This was
carried out through the Office of Policy Coordination, which was
created by Allen Dulles and Frank
Wisner
– the latter being the official who went on to organize coups
(and the attendant propaganda campaigns) against governments in
Iran and Guatemala. (Wisner's son and namesake, incidentally,
was a vice chairman at AIG – the CIA's favorite global insurance
conglomerate – until 2009; more recently he was tapped by the
Obama administration to serve as a back-channel contact with
Hosni Mubarak and Omar Suleiman.)

The tendrils of "Operation Mockingbird" extended through every
significant national media organ, from the Washington Post and
Newsweek to the Time-Life conglomerate, from the New York Times
to CBS. As a result, according to former CIA analyst Ray
McGovern, the Fourth Estate "has been captured by government and
corporations, the military-industrial complex, the intelligence
apparatus." It is, in everything but name, an appendage of the
Regime. This is clearly seen every time the Regime decides the
time has come to mount another campaign of humanitarian
bloodshed abroad.

Having "learned nothing from the horrors that they cheer-led
like excitable teenage girls over the past 15 years, these
bohemian bombers, these latte-sipping lieutenants, these iPad
imperialists are back," sighs a wearily disgusted Brendan
O'Neill in the London Telegraph. "This time they're demanding
the invasion of Libya."

On O'Neill's side of the Atlantic, the Fleet Street Samurai are
peddling "rumors of systematic male rape" in Libya. Others
insist that the prospective war in Libya would in no way
resemble "the foolishness of the Iraq invasion" – just as
similar self-appointed sages promised that the ongoing wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, each of which has lasted at least as long
as the Vietnam War, would not be "another Vietnam."

For some reason, this brings to mind the image of Bullwinkle
repeatedly trying to pull a rabbit from his hat, blithely
batting aside Rocky's complaint that the trick "never works" by
exclaiming, "This time for sure!" This time, we're supposed to
believe – or at least, pretend to believe – that the atrocity
accounts are true, that military action sanctified by the
"international community" is a moral obligation, that warlust
and hatred are virtuous, and that the impending bloodshed will
be a cleansing stream.

As is the case, one supposes, with any other variety, war
pornography is nothing if not predictable. However, unlike
Bullwinkle's inept attempts at thaumaturgy, war porn is a trick
that seems to work every time.

March 1, 2011

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate
blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.